34 OCTOBER 2. f. 19.3 1 SHOUT S AND MURMURS ß Y WAY OF INTR.ODUCTION T HE other evening an idle and faintly malicious dinner party took up, in a big way, the solemn question as to who in our day had per- formed the greatest, or at least the most conspicuous, work of supereroga- tion. The decision went by acclaim to that somewhat blurred carbon copy of a notable sire, the Governor of Porto Rico. Of course we had in mind the letters with which the current The- odore Roosevelt graciously equipped Captain Lindbergh when the then really lone eagle set forth on his first visit to Paris-requested letters of in- troduction written to the end that the young stranger should not, on his friendless arrival, be snubbed by Mr. Herrick, nor be turned gruffly from the door of the American Embassy. Not being one of those credulous souls who believe in scions, I can enjoy a joke at the expense of the little colonel as well as the next man. But my smile at the recollection of that particular episode turned wry just as it was widen- ing to the fine dimensions of a grin. For suddenly I recalled that I, myself, had once been brash enough to write an in trod uction to "Alice in W onder- land." Of course that was many years ago, and I had, by the way, comfortably forgotten the incident until chance and a dreary train ride recently exhumed it. One day when I had a penitential hour in prospect, I stopped at the book- stall in the Grand Central long enoug!1 to snatch a volume from the series of the cherished Modern Library. It was the Carroll masterpiece, and it had a preface. Once settled in the smoker, I began idly to read this foreword, and had not finished a page when something sickeningl y familiar in the sty Ie made me turn to the end to see what ink- stained jackanapes had written it. My own signature stared me out of coun- tenance. Later I had occasion to wish I had obeyed my first impulse to leave it discreetly in the train as a contribu- tion to the large and, I suppose, richly varied library of the porter. But in- stead I carried it on to Crosby Gaige's farm on the hills near Peekskill, where it was picked up some days afterward by a visiting ten -year-old who, with an uncomplicated child's dreadful capacity to hit the pin on the head, observed: "Say, Mr. Gaige, I never knew that that Mr W oollcott wrote the inter- ruption to 'Alice in Wonderland.' " When Theodore 2nd read the cabled accounts of all Paris getting a crick in the neck from scanning the skies for the first glimpse of the arriving Lindbergh, he must, on recall- ing those excruciatingly superfluous letters of his tucked away in a leathern pocket, have felt a certain sheepishness. I know I felt some such sheepishness the other evening when I was installed as toastmaster at a dinner designed as the opening gun of Heywood Broun's dogged campaign for a seat in that vestigial and vermiform body, the Board of Aldermen. Besides Broun, the speakers included Charney Vladeck, Morris Hillquit, and Norman Thomas, men known to every person in the audience-at least by sight and sound. In other words, I was supposed to in- troduce speakers who (to borrow a phrase in variably employed by the chairman as a preface to a veritable out- burst of biography) needed no intro- duction. Made pensive by this subduing thought, I came to the conclusion that properly a toastmaster should blend the functions of butler and bouncer. Ex- cept for bawling out the name of each arriving speaker, it is his chief duty (as represen6ng the implied police power of the audience) to keep count on each itching Demosthenes, and ruthlessly cut short the inevitable one at every din- ner who thinks the limitation of the speakers to five minutes each, while a splendid rule, is not, of course, meant to apply to himself. S PEAKING of introductions-but there, surely such verbal connective tissue is unnecessary. Indurated readers of this page are doubtless only too aware that it makes no pledge to be coherent. Besides, this time it must be easy to discern the processes of associa- tion by which two nouns (one proper, and one common enough) in the fore- going text suddenly summoned from the cavern of memory a story I heard once upon a time, and now feel im- pelled to pass on to you forthwith. It is the story of a richly deserved disaster which happened on a train some five- and-twenty years ago-the kind of dis- aster whIch most of us are always c.ourt- ing by our own deep-seated and (to my notion) quite inexplicable poltroonery. It befell, as I recall, a Mrs. Irwin-I think one of the wives of one of the writing IrwÎns. Anyway, she was journeying to Washington one day-it was back in 1906, mind you-when she became a ware that she was being bowed to af- fably by a woman across the aisle who evidently knew her and remembered her, but whom she could not, for the life of her, identify. Now in this famil- iar predicament, she lacked, as most of us do, the simple courage to say "I am very sorry, but I haven't the faintest idea who the hell you are." I, myself, who would ever be ready, at the drop of a hint, to leap into this angry flood and swim to yonder point; I, who in battles on land and sea have borne my- self with a kind of lumpish and lym- phatic calm; I, who have even been known to volunteer all that is mortal of your correspondent (no small offer) as an experimental field for the work of microbe-hunters in pursuit of the germ of trench fever; I-Heaven and Dr. Freud know why-have never yet screwed up enough courage to behave with ordinary candor on such occasions. My fellow caitiff, Mrs. Irwin, re- sorted instead to all the familiar devices of artful exploration. She rattled on and on ahout this and that, hoping that from a chance remark some light would dawn. At last the mysterious woman said "Dear, dear, I don't believe I've seen you since that afternoon in Wash- ington when my brother introduced us. " Washington! Her brother! That sounded like a clue. Mrs. Irwin leapt . fl " y " h to It as a trout to a y. es, yes, s e replied, haying now like a hound on the scent, "your brother. And what is he doing now?" It seemed a natural and harmless query, but instantly the woman stiffen- ed, and Mrs. Irwin could see that she had said something unfortunate. In- deed her now quite Arctic vis-à-vis, who, as luck would have it, happened to be Mrs. Douglas Robinson, replied glacially: "He's still the president of the United States." -ALEXANDER W OOLLCOTT